I come home from work,
Pick up the teddy bear for some lovin'.
"Don't touch me, I'm all fucked out." he says.
The teddy bear tells me he's all fucked out!
"Woa!" I say.
You know just as much as I know that a teddy bear is really an inanimate
object and therefore can't talk so he therefore can not have said "I'm all
fucked out." Besides that, a teddy bear is only fluff and cloth, merely a
receptor of surrogate tenderness, just hard eyes and a nose atop a
roundness. Who would want to fuck one anyway? Who would want to fuck a
teddy bear, especially one so much the worse for the wear? Why would any
one even want to pick up such a grungy bunch of polyester and polyurethane?
But someone obviously has. (I think this as if I don't remember doing it,
as if I can't remember the times I've touched that teddy bear, the strokes
and caresses accumulated until parts of his fur are now as smooth as a
stone, his eyes hanging on long streams, his stuffing is leaving his body
in slow exits--onto the floor and into the garbage never to return to it.)
The teddy bear never speaks again
Although I insist on touching him once in a while.
He wears away and fades into a grey thing.
One day I forget where I put him.